Rhythmbox isn't seeing all of my music files

Solution 1:

I had a similar problem with Rhythmbox. I don't have nearly the number of files you have, but it was not seeing new files or changed files. I did the following:

1. In Preferences --> Music, I unchecked "Watch my Library for new files".
2. Completely closed Rhythmbox (important).
3. Renamed the rhythmbox database - ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml
4. Started up Rhythmbox and checked "Watch my Library for new files".
5. It started checking my collection and found everything.

It seems that my problem was an issue with the configuration file. I had reinstalled Rhythmbox, but had not done a complete uninstall. This left a corrupted configuration file in my Rhythmbox sub-directory. You may want to try this if it's possible that you have a corrupted configuration file.

Solution 2:

There are two elements to Rhythmbox noticing files: the inotify watches on all the subdirectories (which may have hit a maximum, check /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches, but it should be very high, higher than the number of directories you probably have), and the other is the file type detection that GStreamer is seeing.

Try to see if there are differences from GStreamer's perspective of the file. You can use gst-typefind to do this. A report like this may be useful to help track it down:

find /path/to/files -type f -print0 | xargs -0 gst-typefind

Solution 3:

It is possible that using a symbolic link or using multiple locations could be "confusing" Rhythmbox. I've got around 10.000 songs and they are all present and accounted for. But they weren't all there until I used the absolute paths to the files. That's the worst thing about Rhythmbox - no file browser.

As a side note, I don't know how you store your music, but you can set multiple library locations with the gconf-editor under apps --> Rhythmbox --> library_locations.

To see if the files are the problem rather than Rhythmbox being the issue check out the File Browser plugin. It won't let you browser your entire file system, but it will let you browser your configured music directory by file rather than relying on Rhythmbox to read the tags. You can find it here (w/instructions): http://www.webupd8.org/2010/09/folderview-rhythmbox-plugin-to-browse.html

I don't see the point of this plugin personally, but I've tried it and it does work; in your case it would likely be useful.

If your looking for a good alternative with file browsing capability and so on, I've been using Clementine a lot. It's easily my favorite Linux player (but I still use Rhythmbox too!). You can check it out here: http://code.google.com/p/clementine-player/